The handling of patients in both hospitals and mortuaries has been done manually for years including up to the present time. Manual handling includes rolling a human body toward you and then lifting the body with your legs. Manual handling also involves a 2 to 3 person sheet transfers for transferring a patient from a bed to a gurney or the like. At a mortuary, a dead body must be transferred from a table, after the mortician has prepared the body for burial, to a casket. This usually requires two people to effect the lifting. If the corpse is of an extra heavy or large person, it may require 3 workers to effect the desired lifting of the body. These old methods can cause back injuries to the body handling personnel that could be career ending and liabilities to their employers. In addition, these old methods leave the body handling personnel overly fatigued and more likely to sustain injury in continuing to handle bodies by these old procedures.
It is known that attempts have been made in the recent past to utilize a single person to operate a ceiling mounted rail and hoist structure with lifting apparatuses for transferring a body in a mortuary. This prior apparatus utilized a state of the art rail and hoist ceiling mounted structure that utilized a double, scissor type lifting structure having a pair of body scoop elements for engaging and supporting a body to be lifted and transported to a casket. This structure was abandoned due to the fact that the spacing between the scoop elements was not wide enough to be useful with different body widths. In addition, the length of the double, scissor type structure required so much vertical length that all present day room heights, 7-8 feet, could not accommodate the necessary double, scissor type structure to be useful in rooms of reduced height, further leading to the commercial abandonment of such a structure.